Forum Discussion
Jaspos
Aug 06, 2025Copper Contributor
Excel number format thousand separator not working as expected
Here's the situation My system thousand separator is [space], but in some situations I wish to use comma as the separator. But, when I set the number format for this on the cells required it does ...
HansVogelaar
Aug 07, 2025MVP
As you have found, Excel will not treat another character correctly as thousands separator. As a workaround, you can use the following custom number format:
[<=-1000]-0,000;[>=1000]0,000;0
Note that this format will only insert one comma, so it is correct up to 999,999.
If you only need to do this for non-negative numbers, you can use
[>=1000000]0,000,000;[>=1000]0,000;0
This will work correctly up to 999,999,999:
- JennyT2070Aug 19, 2025Copper Contributor
what if I need that for negative numbers as well?
- JasposAug 09, 2025Copper Contributor
Hey Hans, that's a great workaround, thanks, didn't know you could do that with number formats!
(And how crazy the normal approach simply doesn't work, seems mad this can't be fixed by MS - as if it doesn't work, why offer it?!)